


Manmade lakes and Other Natural Phenomenon

by Pavuvu



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen, High School, Short Story, Summer Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 11:50:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3976996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pavuvu/pseuds/Pavuvu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The summer rains hit, leaving the pavement smelling like spilt beer and the air thick with humidity and far way thunder. She called me during one of the downpours and for the first time I found myself standing in her driveway, three steps from the porch, five from knocking, something like twenty seconds from seeing the girl who had shaped the last few months of my life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Manmade lakes and Other Natural Phenomenon

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a Creative writing class the fall semester of my Senior year. Story 2.

The bleachers were full of middle aged women, small children, and a girl around my age I had never seen before. Though I stood a fair distance away under a freshly planted tree, I could see the girl’s hunched figure and her complete ignorance of the softball game before her.

Her eyes would flick up from the book in her lap every few minutes and it was during this time she caught me watching. She paused for a moment then tucked the book into a drawstring bag and jumped from the raised metal bench. She made her way to me, walking with a swing in her hips that caught the eye of teenage boys and their fathers alike.

“Is this staring at people thing normal for you, or is today just lucky for me?” The girl cranked her eyebrow when she asked, and for a moment I was struck dumb by her upfront manner.

Her hair was dark and loosely curled, and her eyes were a blue I had only seen in the movie theater, where strenuous effort was put into lighting and a carefully chosen shirt would bring out the dullest of hues.

“Sorry, no. I didn’t mean to creep.” I replied when my voice returned to me. “I just never saw you before.”

“You wouldn’t have. I just moved in.”

“Ah. Well, let me be the first to welcome you to the Town of so Much to See, so Much to Do.”

“Boy, do I feel welcome.” She thrust her hand to me and our fingers twined, “I’m Elizabeth Carter. People I like get to call me Eli.”

“Kate Bandy.” I took my hand back and shoved my fingers into the nearly nonexistent pockets of my shorts.

We started at each other for an awkward moment before Elizabeth put her hands on her hips and said, “Well Kate, you going to show me around or do I need to remove you from the people I like?”

My mouth cranked into a smile, “Sure thing Eli.”

I led her down the warn gravel path between ball fields and to the park proper. We passed onto broken asphalt trails and down around the little manmade lake, and the old playground. We walked round and round talking about inconsequential things, her move to the college town, how long she had been here, what she thought of the town in flux.

Answers which came to be ‘recently and well enough.’ She told me she imagined it was different when school was in session and I didn’t disagree.

After a while we wound our way back to the ball fields and stood by the bleachers, and I jerked my head at the fields. “Is your sister playing?”

“No. I don’t have siblings.” Her eyebrow quirked in that way I had learned she would do when she found something amusing. “I wanted to get out of the mover’s way, this was the first place I found that wasn’t student housing or store fronts.”

I conceded her point and we watched the last inning come to a close and the sun fade in the sky. We walked to the parking lot and she stopped before the bike rack and fiddled with her lock.

“I can give you a ride to your place if you want.” I jerked a thumb toward the lot. “My truck bed is big enough for the bike.”

Eli just shook her head. “Thanks, I’m good. But here…” She shoved her phone at me, “Give me your number and I’ll call you once I’m settled in yeah?”

The week past slowly like they do at the beginning of summer, as if you have all the time in the world. On the days I woke up early I’d eat breakfast with my parents before they went off to work at the state college that ruled our town’s life. Mom taught medieval and renaissance art history and she gave a few summer courses to keep busy. Dad had become head coach of the football team after a decade as offensive coordinator. He puttered around the stadium, ordered supplies and planned for the following season.

The day Eli called; Mom was still sitting at the table when I appeared downstairs. She lifted her Best of Michelangelo coffee mug to her lips and grimaced down at the stack of papers before her.

“I just don’t understand it,” She flicked her red pen across the page, “ This is a 500 level class, how do they not know by now that nude is when your clothes are off and  naked is when you don’t have clothes on and you’re getting up to something. My hopes for this semester are now like my coffee mug.”

“Empty?”

“Yes dear,” Mom raised her coffee mug and shook it at me pointedly.

I rolled my eyes and grabbed the pot off the burner.

My phone buzzed shortly after I finished my bowl of cereal, just showed two simple words and an unknown number.

‘The Park?” the screen asked.

I typed a response and saved the number.

I parked my truck in the lot and sat in the bed until Eli showed.

I jumped down and walked towards her. “You finally got all those boxes unpacked?”

“Yeah,” She grinned at me. “Had to put the kitchen together for Dad, he’s kind of useless there.”

We took a few turns around the lake, watching the runners pass, and children play at the park, until the sun and the heat grew too unbearable to remain outside.

“You like ice cream?” I asked, wiping sweat from my hairline.

“You know a place?” She asked in return. I smiled.

We ended up at a Sonic, a few miles away, drinking milkshakes in the bed of my truck, legs hanging off the tailgate, her bike propped against the silver toolbox by the window.

Back at the park it had taken some convincing to get her to relinquish her bike to the truck bed, her face a mixture of stubborn refusal and an emotion I didn’t want to describe as fear.

 “I just don’t trust cars.” Eli said when she finally buckled herself in beside me, “It has nothing to do with you Kate. I promise.”

            After meeting Eli that second time, my days fell into a sort of pattern. If I wasn’t working or helping mom grade papers, I found myself at the park, lazily circling the lake with Eli. We would giggle when shirtless young men ran past, she would comment on the slope of their shoulders, and how we really should start running too. Sometimes we’d go for ice cream but more often than not we would stand in the parking lot before the bike racks and say our goodbyes, each wondering if we had reached a point in our friendship to end each meeting with a hug.

The summer rains hit, leaving the pavement smelling like spilt beer and the air thick with humidity and far way thunder. She called me during one of the downpours and for the first time I found myself standing in her driveway, three steps from the porch, five from knocking, something like twenty seconds from seeing the girl who had shaped the last few months of my life.

When Elizabeth appeared in the doorway, her smile made up for the rain.

She pulled me inside, her hand warm on my shoulder, and she led me into the kitchen where the rumble of crowd noise could be heard from the TV and a pitcher wound up on the mound.  A man who I assumed to be her father sat at the table, laptop before him and a craft beer bottle by his hand.

She introduced me quickly and I underwent the general questions. Hi, how are you? Where do you go to school? And other such things.  It wasn’t long before Eli pulled me away and we went down into the basement.

“I hope you don’t mind,” She said when we got off the stairs and entered the finished space. “But I feel kind of like a movie today.”

I assured her it was fine and she knelt down in front of the DVD player and fiddled for a moment before she sat on the couch and pulled me down beside her, notching me under her arm like a Siamese twin.

“It’s my favorite movie,” She confessed as the title screen proclaimed ‘Pride and Prejudice’, “I mean, it’s not all that different from any other Jane Austin story, but I just adore it.”

I lounged against her side, feet kicked up on the table before us and tried figure out why a rude stick in the mud like Mr. Darcy has enraptured women for generations.

            School started long before I was ready and it was there that first day back that I learned Eli was a year ahead of me. A senior, BMOC, one more year and she’d be off at college and I’d still be here, without her. I sat in my first class of the new school year and my stomach turned over itself. There was a part of me that could not help but fear that in this place outside the established bounds of the park I would cease to be important to her. That Eli would find friends in her own year mates, and leave me, and my younger worries and desires in that place where all summer friendships go to rot.

The whole day my stomach felt like a liter of Canada Dry had exploded in its lining, and nothing I did seem to quell it. It wasn’t until I had walked out to my car after the last class and found Eli’s bike already in the back and the girl herself sitting on the hood that I realized that for today, things were going to be okay.

The next few months passed quickly, a barrage of English papers, and weekend football games, where mom and I stood bundled in navy and black on the sidelines, screaming for State to destroy the opposing team’s line.

One of the games Eli joined us for went poorly for State, which was unusual in itself, and I bugged out shortly after the final second ticked from the clock, unable and unwilling to hear Dad tear his players a new one for poorly executed plays.  

We elbowed our way through the crowds and out into the parking lot just in time to see a car crash into a concrete barrier separating the stadium from the street. The little Toyota looked like an imploded soup can by the time the noise settled down. Eli had halted a few steps behind me, but her hand was tight around my arm, as if she meant to pull me back before her body froze on her and her nails started to bite into my skin.

“Hey.” I said, easing her grip from my arm and transferring it to my hand, “Its ok. Their fine, see? Car took all the damage, it’s all good.”

She swallowed hard and tore her gaze away. “Yeah, yeah ok. Let’s just go ok?”

“Yeah, of course.” I pulled her away from the scene and through the parking lot until we reached the truck. I pulled her door open, and helped her inside before getting in myself. We sat silently, waiting for the radiator to warm the air blowing into the cab, and for the line of cars creeping slowly behind me to clear.

“It wasn’t just Dad and I until a few years ago.” She started when the chatter of the radio DJ got too oppressive.

“Eli, you don’t have to tell me, I don’t think anything less…”

“Shut up Kate, I want to.”

Her breath left her in a few angry puffs before she started again. “Mom was driving home from work when she had an epileptic fit. She wrapped her car around a concrete pylon, one of the ones that hold up bridges y’know? The police say she died on impact and I guess I choose to believe them, can’t fathom thinking she died painfully. But just… ever since then…”

I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and repeated the words she said to me early into the summer. “You just can’t trust cars.”

She nodded silently, and her shoulders shook under my arm, but her eyes were dry and remained that way as I drove her home.

            Winter break came not long after and our house was in a constant state of flux between the football players stopping by for dinner, and preparations for Bowl Season. State had been invited for the Aloha Bowl in Hawaii, and Mom and Dad were both frenzied in between packing and trying to figure out what to do with me.

“Hey it’s ok. I’ll be fine by myself. You don’t have to worry about it, go enjoy Hawaii.” I told them more than once over the course of the month.

My assurances did little to dull their guilt over not being able to bring me to Hawaii with them over Christmas and as much as I would have liked to go to the Islands and stretch out on the beach, I knew Dad would be too busy corralling his rowdy players to really have much time for family.

My parents left five days before Christmas, driving early in the morning for the airport. Eli came over in the early afternoon, bike wheels leaving crunchy tracks in the light dusting of snow.

“You’re such an idiot.” She said when she opened the front door and walked right in. She stomped snow off her boots and walked into the kitchen and shoved some of Moms Christmas cookies in her mouth. “Go pack some clothes, Dad say you can stay with us.”

It was shortly after my parents returned from Hawaii when Eli began to apply for college. She would sit with her laptop more often than not, filling out forms and scholarships to schools all across the country. Never once did I see her fill one out for State.

“You don’t want to say here?” I confronted her one day.

She slowed her typing and looked up at me. “There’s more to this world than just this town and State, Kate. I want to see some of it before I have to settle down.”

I turned away from her and stared at the wall by the TV. “Yeah ok.”

I should have known better than to think a girl like Eli would stay in this town. There was nothing here for her besides her father and me. She made no effort to make other friends. It was a month into school when she told me she saw no point in it. She only had one more year in High School anyway; college and college friends were only 365 days away. Why even bother?

It didn’t stop the hurt though. This town and its college were all I knew. Hell, all that I even wanted. I had no higher aspirations than to follow my parent’s paths through those hollowed grounds, stay in the known and comfortable environment that that college campus was for me. It was the only choice, and the obvious choice, and I could no fathom why she didn’t see it the same.

I left her house shortly after, and did not see her for the rest of the week.

            The final count down for winter break began with an ice storm. Power lines snapped, trees fell, and early on Saturday morning, Eli heaved snow balls at my window.

 The crack of heavy ice on my window had me out of bed in the near dark, and down the stairs to let her in. Her face was pale and her boots were only half tied.

“What are you doing here?” I was less than hospitable with the early awakening.

“Oh shit Kate, I know I’m really sorry, it’s just I couldn’t think of anyone else, and Dad called this morning and I need your help.”

“Eli, slow down, what happened?” I pulled her into the kitchen and flicked the lights on before putting the coffee pot onto heat.

“Dad had to leave town for work a few days ago. He was out for a run last night and broke his leg in three places slipping on iced stairs. Dad called this morning and he needs me to come out and be with him, but Kate, all of the ice has closed the airports and I can’t drive.”

“Okay.” I said, placing a coffee mug in front of her. “Let me get dressed.”

We drove out of my neighborhood just as the sun peaked over the trees and the ice that stuck to their branches sparkled like light bouncing off lake water. My trucks wheels crunched and skidded over the unplowed snow and ice, and the cab was quiet except for the GPS squeaking directions out of Eli’s phone.

I pulled onto the highway, which was thankfully clearer than the streets in town, turned on cruise control and settled in for a long haul.

We traveled south through two states before stopping for lunch, then east through one more before we pulled off the highway, and made our way through busy city streets toward the hospital.

I parked, then followed Eli though the hospital doors. She didn’t bother checking in with the nurse, just jammed a finger on the elevator button and sent us up five levels. She didn’t straight out tell me, but I knew her father being in this hospital agitated something deep within her.

We came to a stop outside a door marked 514, and I squeezed her hand with mine. “It’ll be okay.”

“Yeah,” She nodded and pulled away from me. “Thanks Kate.”

She entered the room and closed the door, but I could still hear her dad’s voice through the thin walls, and the distant beep of a heart monitor.

I sat down against the wall, even though there were perfectly good chairs back in this floors lobby, but I couldn’t be bothered to go wait there.

The passing nurses all side eyed me the first few times the passed me by but didn’t say anything. After a while I became a fixture to them and it stopped to matter.

In the hallway with walls painted in pale squash, I realized Eli had forgotten about me. My phone said it was 2:30 in the morning, and most of the hospital staff had changed over to raccoon eyed nurses, and harried doctors.

It was late morning by the time Eli appeared, popping her head out the door like a prairie dog. “Kate, I’m sorry for…”

“It’s okay.” I interrupted her, unwilling to hear whatever excuse she had for me. “What’s the plan?”

An hour later we pulled onto the highway and drove west, the three of us piled into my trucks extended cab. My fingers were cold on the steering wheel, and the sky rising above the pavement was a cloudless grey, the radio skipped between low static and sports talk radio. We passed one mile mark and then another and Eli’s hand came to rest hot and heavy against the back of my neck, her fingers threading through my hair.

It let it remain there until she pulled away and didn’t try to reestablish contact for the rest of the drive.


End file.
